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As It Were — The Writing of Ian Eller

TotalCon Post Mortem: Eclipse Runners

The past weekend was TotalCon 32, the biggest and best gaming convention in New England! As I mentioned prior to the con, I spent the weekend running Starfinder — The Eclipse Runners, a sequel to the Dropship Murphies mini-campaign of Carnage 20 (the OTHER best gaming convention in New England).

Par for the course I had a great group of players, some sitting for all 5 RPG sessions (plus one massive space combat session) and some just dropping in for a single session. Unlike previous games of this type, the cast of characters remained completely static — 8 seats, 8 pre-generated PCs the entire time. This provided a strong narrative through-line, but at the same time made for a lot of info-dump for single session players later in the game. I am not completely sold on doing it this way in the future, but we shall see.

Eclipse Runners took place in the ruin filled, pirate plagued Corsair Nebula The ship was based out of Nebula City, an independent space station home to everything from organized crime families to Pact World tax-dodging corporations to mining collectives. The station’s 200,000 soul population included representatives of every species in the Starfinder core rules and Alien Archive and beyond. And because the station is willfully independent of governmental control, there is no law except that which Nebula City provides for itself — and that means lots of work for the likes of the crew of the Eclipse.

The adventures began with a choice: fly out to save some miners whose ship had been impacted by an asteroid, or loot an ancient temple tumbling through the void on the surface of a chunk of a long ago destroyed planet. If you have been paying attention, it is probably pretty easy to guess where the Eclipse was off to.

They discovered the temple was full of undead (big surprise there) and valueless treasure (oops) but they did take a strange sarcophagus onto their ship (what?) but did not open it (whew) before selling it for a few thousand credits (yay!) to a member of the Corpse Fleet (it’ll be fine).

Next they were hired to escort an academic science vessel to a planet full of strange ancient alien technology. What could go wrong? The planet ended up being infested with graboids and the researcher in charge did not need an escort so much as a mobile power unit shaped like a ship. The treacherous professor tried to use the graboids to kill the PCs but was outsmarted by Meera and was herself fed to the graboids. It turned out the ancient alien tech the professor wanted to activate was a Stargate network that would have likely made the Drift obsolete. Meera convinced the grad students to work for the Eclipse Runners and planned on making use of the technology themselves.

In order to do so, though, they would have to build Eclipse a walking around body, since the AI only ever entered the ship in the first place to be able to explore the stars. Weird, then, that she seemed totally happy living in Nebula City for over a year, right?

After their success at the Stargate planet,the party decided on a little R&R in a dance club called Oontz Oontz. And isn’t it always the way — you go out to get your Travolta on and two powerful angels tasked with controlling mortal access to high technology show up and demand you turn over your AI friend to them. Well, it is always the way with the Eclipse crew. Anyway, the Runners politely declined with high caliber weapons fire and explosions. The angels were sent back upstairs but not before they threatened righteous vengeance. And then the owner kicked them out for breaking some lights.

While on the way home to sleep off their intoxicoontz, they noticed some miners walking around with a lot more military bearing than one would expect from rock hoppers. They weren’t just any rock hoppers, either — they were crew members of the mining vessel that the Eclipse Runners had declined to save back in session one. Long story short: the miners were actually members of an Azlanti cell hoping to sabotage Nebula City. Their means of sabotage was especially insidious: move a whole bunch of Swarm eggs into the maintenance tunnels and let them hatch. I think you have all seen the movie that comes next.

Luckily the PCs were able to discover and thwart the plot. I amy have failed to mention up to this point that the Eclipse Runners were not especially subtle about their adventures. In fact, they made an effort to be very public: SpaceBook live feeds, Instagamma posts and Go-Pro’s mounted to the barrels of rifles and the heads of axes and hammers. Did you know taking a selfie with a defeated enemy was a swift action? So, upon saving everyone on the station from a horrible death at the mandibles of overgrown prawns, the crew was suddenly famous and beloved.

Now installed in really nice digs with a premium berth for Eclipse, the crew is ready to enjoy the high life. That’s when a goblin named Mur shows up in Bramble’s quarters and begs for help: as part of their plan to install the Swarm eggs in the maintenance shafts, the Azlanti needed to eliminate the goblins that infest those areas. So they released something squamous which made a habit of eating a goblin, joining the corpse with other technology it had consumed, and shitting it out as a cybernetic zombie. Having seen the PCs on the holovidtelenetfeedchannels, Mur took it upon herself to convince them to save the remaining goblins. Once they were in his “throne room” her father the goblin king (who looked nothing like David Bowie save for the really tight pants) was inclined to offer them a reward: the location where the Azlanti had stowed all of their gear for when they came to clean up after the Swarm had eaten the station populace.

The PCs made relatively short work of the thing (which turned out made great grenades if you could scrape it up without hurting yourself) and went off to claim there reward. Along the way they discovered the Azlanti had used small drones to create a real time virtual map of the entire station maintenance system. Whether any Azlanti were still watching it was uncertain.

Funny story: it turns out one of the things the Azlanti stowed was a massive ancient warbot full of chain guns and bad vibes. There was some question of whether to and how to go about dealing with it, but finally Hoss Bloodhammer’s simple philosophy of “I ain’t got time to bleed” won out. The machine was full of piss, vinegar and bullets and nearly killed Bloodhammer but in the end the smooth operative Niki put it down. On the live feed, of course. Top five “likes” in Spacebook history.

After they cleaned out the Azlanti stowed gear and chucked the potentially regenerative war machine into a nearby black hole, the PCs were summoned by the powers that be. Upon arriving to the meeting, they were asked via paper note (PAPER!) to shut down all their comms. It turned out the station Steward was scared to death that Eclipse might overhear the meeting — in which he told the party he was scared to death of Eclipse and could they please ask their pet godlike AI to stop infecting station systems, if it isn’t too much trouble please don’t shoot me. It was weird the way Eclipse was fine with living on the station when all she had wanted to do before was explore the galaxy, wasn’t it?

Aaaaannnnyway, there was no time to deal with that, since a fleet of Azlanti capital ships were about to drop out of the Drift and attack the station! All the machinations to sabotage the station had been in preparation of an invasion that was happening right now!

That was the end of the regular, role-playing elements. The final Sunday morning session was The Battle For Nebula City, in which eight players commanding about 30 ships (including the bad guys played by me) fought for the future of the station while a Mysterious Countdown promised something ominous. One third of the ships were pirates, come to take advantage of the chaos, one third were ships mounting a defense for the station and one third were Azlanti. The defense vessels offered the pirates amnesty for helping defend the station but most declined and turned their guns on the defenders while the Azlanti tore into them as well. Soon, though, the pirates realized they weren’t going to make out much better in the end and joined the defenders. Through focused fire and a significant reduction in player assholery, the day was won and an Azlanti ship was crippled. With the Azlanti flagship in dire straights itself and the third well on its way, the Azzies decided to leave and return with a greater force to take Nebula City.

Which would probably have worked had the countdown not reached zero and Eclipse had not taken over the station systems and turned it into a massive Drift capable vessel. The defending ships and pirates were left to float in the Void as Eclipse took her crew plus 200,000 people on a magical mystery tour.

The End. Well, until Carnage 21, November 2-4 in Killington VT, anyway.